Archive for the 'Counting Crows' Tag Under 'Soundcheck' Category

Celebrities of every stripe have been raising funds and opening their wallets to help in the wake of Japan's massive earthquake and tsunami, but some of California's most popular music names have joined the cause in earnest.

Last week Blink-182's Mark Hoppus gathered up a sizable chunk of cash (at least more than $100,000) via eBay by auctioning off personal mementos -- clothes from video appearances, handwritten lyrics and such.

And now O.C.'s biggest superstar, Gwen Stefani, has gone all out, personally donating $1 million to the relief effort, also via Save the Children.

"I've been inspired by Japan for many years and have a true love, appreciation and respect for the Japanese people and their culture," she says in a statement on No Doubt's blog, reminding of the role that affinity played in launching both her solo career and fashion lines.

Not everyone will get to see Mary J. Blige on her just-announced Music Saved My Life Tour this fall.

The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, reportedly at work on her 10th album while her 9th, December's Stronger with Each Tear, is barely out of its infancy, will make only make 11 stops, including a lone Southern California date, Oct. 20 at Gibson Amphitheatre, a venue where one of the best R&B vocalists of the modern era has shined the most in her live appearances out here. El Debarge, Jazmine Sullivan and Miguel will open. Tickets, $62.75- $146.75, go on sale Saturday, Sept. 11, at 10 a.m.

Also returning to a recently played venue: Glen Campbell, who was rich but rusty at the Grove of Anaheim in July last year, and who will probably still rely considerably on lyric sheets (not that his fans seem to mind) when he performs there again on Oct. 24. Tickets, $35-$55, are on sale Saturday at 1 p.m.

Making its seemingly annual pilgrimage to Honda Center is Trans-Siberian Orchestra, whose winter spectacle will come to Anaheim on Nov. 24. Tickets, $34.45-$75.90, are on sale Monday at 10 a.m.

Sax star Kenny G also has a holiday show in the works, and will bring it to the Grove on Nov. 21, $45-$75, on sale Saturday at noon.

What Stagecoach, this weekend's ongoing orgy of country music, BBQ and beer in Indio, is still learning from its cooler older cousin Coachella is that performances out here on the verdant but dusty Empire Polo Field ought to be momentous. That's what makes a festival memorable: singular sensations. Yet, in all honesty, though Stagecoach has never failed to be a good time, even for a non-NASCAR watcher like myself, it hasn't exactly produced many one-of-a-kind performances.

Any country star worth his/her weight in platinum is capable of delivering a well-rehearsed production to an immense amount of people; that sort of thing happens all year long at stadium rodeos and state fairs from here to Tallahassee. What I'm talking about is when someone seizes the moment on such a grand scale and achieves something significant with it.

Two years ago, within a week of when they released their current effort this past January, the Magnetic Fields issued an unusual gem: Distortion. Its cover is colored hot pink, and rightly so, for it glaringly stands out from the rest of the ensemble's two decades of work.

True, every new move by Stephin Merritt -- the troupe's prolific songwriting genius and deadpan, aloof spirit -- is immaculately coated in concept. The Charm of the Highway Strip, for instance, the fourth Fields' record, is his reworking of country motifs, while the title and mere existence of his staggering cornucopia 69 Love Songs, among the very best albums of 1999, is concept even at face value -- as is the choice of bathroom-door gender signage for the covers of Distortion and its new companion, the folksier Realism.

Even so, Distortion may always stand apart from its brethren. It teems with the same classicist wit from the same dourly cheeky Merritt, but this time his wistful melodies and tart rhymes had been engulfed by a tsunami of echoing fuzz, in direct homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, a landmark that 25 years later still works like primo Velvet Underground cranked to 11.

Distortion was such a pointed project, its structure as attention-grabbing as its songs, that it broke from the pattern of mostly genteel, sometimes minimalist arrangements the Fields had created up to that point for Merritt's songs. Every album had its fleeting experiments, but Distortion was entirely an experiment. I still wonder why he decided to make it a Magnetic Fields record and not release it under yet another new moniker; in some ways it has more in common with earlier “side projects” like the Gothic Archies and Future Bible Heroes.

(The obvious difference is that Distortion, though at times just as gloomy-sounding, doesn't feature a single synth, the main instrument for those other incarnations. Indeed, Distortion and Realism, it's said, completes a no-synth trilogy begun with the 2004 album i ... though that factoid could also just be Merritt's droll way of saluting Queen, whose constant "no synths" insistence in liner notes until 1980 suggested contempt for the instrument.)

I wanted to hear “Don't Drink the Water” at some point –- and they opened this two-night stand with it. I though it'd be ideal to hear as much of the rich return-to-form Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King as possible –- and between the two shows they played every song from that seventh album at the Greek, save for the late LeRoi Moore's instrumental intro “Grux.”

Take three bands that have very little to do with each other, put them on stage for two hours –- and what do you get?

First and foremost, you get a conglomeration of musicians who adore music and are wiling to try something new, fresh and just plain risky. Secondly, you get The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show, a new sort of Counting Crows concert that also featured Michael Franti + Spearhead and Augustana at the Greek Theatre Tuesday night.

It was obvious something was up a week or so before the gig when Adam Duritz posted a letter to anyone going to the show, explaining that it would begin promptly at ticket time with all of the bands together on stage -– and they would “basically just (play) whenever we feel like playing.”

Was it a threat? A little, though it certainly got people to arrive on time. Unfortunately, the crowd called their bluff, because the event actually started 35 minutes late. (The Associated Press photo above, by the way, is from a Good Morning America spotlight last year.)